


Redshirt

by Nariel



Series: Secrets of the Stars [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Naruto
Genre: Gen, Iwagakure | Hidden Stone Village, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-06
Updated: 2019-11-06
Packaged: 2021-01-24 12:37:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21338377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nariel/pseuds/Nariel
Summary: Seldom are things always as they seem. Ideas and spin-offs from the Stars in the Silence timeline. Part 4: No rest for the wicked. Crossover with Naruto.
Series: Secrets of the Stars [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/386221
Comments: 3
Kudos: 26





	Redshirt

**Author's Note:**

> For gonewind321... two years later because life happened and I’m a dying university student. Note this may or may not stay as a one-shot. I have no plans on where I’m going with this.

In the end, she makes it to twenty-three. It takes thirteen wizards, two werewolves, eight broken bones and a fire to bring her down. She drags them with her; bloodied, bruised and all very much dead before the building they were in collapses like a house of cards as the flames eat through the support beams. 

Aquila gives them some credit as smoke sears her lungs. The few scraps of Death Eaters that managed to evade the DMLE’s pursuits after Voldemort’s demise managed to do what their lord and Bellatrix failed, even if she hadn’t been their target this time.

They’d been after little Harry, and they most likely would have succeeded if she hadn’t been the one babysitting the boy at the time.

For all the horror and death that happened during the Blood War, James, Lily and anyone else that could have been watching little Harry wouldn’t have gone for throats like she had. Her brothers might have been able to match her viciousness, but not her trickery or paranoia. No one would have been able to get Harry out of that kill zone once the anti-apparition, anti-portkey and anti-floo wards had sprung up.

If all went well, little Harry wouldn’t be too traumatized by her death and her brothers… would understand. 

Aquila coughs weakly, tiny droplets further staining the carpet below her. Somewhere in the back of her mind she can sense Sirius’ panic, his desperation, his grief. It easily drowns out any fear or physical pain she feels. Death was something she was well overdue, but the thought of what it would bring - what it’d already brought - to Sirius and Regulus cuts deeper than any curse or blade.

_ Siri… Reggie… I-I’m sorry… _

.

Aquila lingers.

She lingers to see her twin shatter into uncountable pieces when he pulls her body out of the rubble that is Godric’s Hollow, when he realises that her body was still warm because of the flames and not because of any life in it.

She lingers to see Reggie arrive with a crack of thunder, so different from the whisper of his normal Apparition, only to fall to his knees wailing.

She lingers to see James’ head lowered throughout her funeral, choking out apologies, Lily at his side desperately clutching little Harry in her arms, Aquila’s necklace still tightly wrapped around the boy’s wrist.

She lingers to see Remus try to patch everyone back together, even as he drowns himself in sorrow, solitude and alcohol.

She lingers to see Mipsy stumble through the last of her orders - Abigail dies, murdered as she was closing Golden Feathers for the day in a robbery gone wrong two months after Aquila passes while Alfred develops a bad case of pneumonia which steals his life that winter.

She lingers to see her oldest friend disappear from her home.

She lingers to see all her Wills read. Abigail’s savings are split 15-85, five percent given to William, Stephen and Hadmec each as thanks for sticking with her all these years. The rest, like all of Alfred’s wealth is funneled through a network of banks and transfers, bouncing from country to country, from bank to bank, until it enters Aquila’s Gringotts bank, two days before Aquila’s Will is released.

She lingers to see the faces of disbelief on everyone’s faces, bar her brothers, as her Bank Manager reads out the contents of her Will and exactly how she acquired them, as per her instructions.

She lingers to see Reggie shake his head, eyes watering with a mixture of grief and mirth, a half-smile on his face, a whisper of ‘how predictable’ on his lips.

She lingers to see Sirius’ shoulders shake, a soft chuckle escaping him which slowly gains volume until it’s all but ringing across the chamber they are in. Tears stream down his face, but his eyes finally, _ finally _ burn with emotion, with a fire that Aquila had feared would never rise again.

Aquila lingers for one year and three days. She lingers to see her Bank Manager tell her brothers that she loves them with all her heart, that she’s so sorry, but so grateful that she’s the one to leave first. She lingers to see her broken brave boys piece themselves together, supported and loved by friends, family and each other.

Aquila lingers just long enough for her own broken heart to fix itself again, even if it doesn’t beat in her chest anymore. And then she lets go.

.

She wakes up _ again _.

Just like she did twenty-four years ago.

She wakes up to tears, shrieks, a burn in her stomach and chest and a feeling of _ wrongwrongwrong- _

.

She’s Akira now, so tauntingly close to Aquila that she doesn’t respond to it for a year. She doesn’t speak, doesn’t even make a sound for twice as long.

It doesn’t hurt quite as much as one might expect. Her caretakers - _ not parents, not Orion and Walburga, not Dad not Mother - _are unnervingly alert and attentive to her needs as an infant, so she doesn’t starve, doesn’t feel as much as a moment of discomfort when she inevitably soils herself and they soon find themselves with two more infants to care for when she stumbles into her toddler years.

She’s right smack in the middle of five children, with two older brothers that she’s not a twin of and two younger sisters. It helps her keep her already skewered hold on sanity just there. Just long enough for her female caretaker to return to her job, decked out in armor plates and a snarling mask. Just long enough for her to familiarize herself with the rocky, mountainous area that surrounds her new house. Just long enough to see people scale walls and cliffs with impossible ease, all wearing some variation of a band of metal with two boulder-like imprints on them. Just long enough for her to put the pieces together.

Just long enough to break all over again.

.

She unlocks her chakra four months after turning three. Her caretakers spend the next two years training her body, mind and chakra, turning her into something deadlier than anything she’d ever been in her past two lives.

Nine out of ten times her spars with her brothers end with them on their backs and her knives on their throats. Strangely, they never seem to hold it against her, instead choosing to direct their frustrations at themselves.

After the handful of times they do manage to beat her, it ends up with both of them breaking down what went wrong and what went right for all of them. It’s strangely mature of them, and makes her somewhat fond of them even if she’d already arrived at the same analysis seconds of the spar concluded.

It’s from Riku and Asahi that she learns of the whispers of disgust and rage at the other Shinobi Villages. She learns of economic disparities that only grow bigger by the month. She learns of factions being formed, of treaties being signed across the Five Great Nations.

She learns of all of this and thinks _ war _.

She thinks of Riku and Asahi, both performing well, but ultimately just average Academy students. 

She thinks of Yuzuki and Miyako, her younger sisters. Yuzuki only just started to speak without a lisp in every other sentence. Miyako barely able to toddle few steps on her own.

She thinks of her caretakers, only in their mid-twenties and clearly good shinobi. Good, but not outstanding.

She thinks of Sirius and Regulus. Of her friends she’d left behind. Of the peace she’d made when she’d thought that she would be dying for real.

She thinks of herself. She thinks of Aquila and Akira.

.

Akira enters the Academy at the age of six. She’s known as the daughter of Aisaka Haruki and Mizuki, both jōnin of Iwagakure, the third of her siblings to start her shinobi journey. Her instructor and peers look at her and her family and mutter of potential. Akira looks at the same picture and thinks _ redshirts, expendable, faceless. _

After all, she’d been born outside of Konoha, outside of _ the Plot _, an enemy of a different time.

No rest for the wicked it seems.

.

_ (Akira throws her classmate over her shoulder and out of the sparring boundary. Her instructor nods and gestures for the next girl to step up. Akira’s eight people into her streak and half and hour later, she’s has an unbroken streak of nineteen. By the end of the class she faces the ‘champion’ of the boys’ spar. _

_ Akira has him in a joint-lock forty-eight seconds into the match. _

_ Her classmates are silent as always.) _

**Author's Note:**

> How much of Naruto does Aquila-Akira know? Just enough to make conversation.  
As for why the sudden update - felt like returning to the story but I wanted to get to know Aquila and co. again, so I’m working on Secrets before I go back to the main fic.


End file.
